28 ms·

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

57 points by lproven 3y ago

baal80spam 3y ago
With or without OS/2, it would be really interesting to see how everything turned out. Windows had such a profound impact on both business and personal computing that we might've been in a completely different place!
dflock 3y ago
Liam Proven does some stellar work for the Reg: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
- lproven 3y ago
  Oh, thank you very much indeed! :-)
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work. Back in the day dogfooding was the Microsoft way. Well, at least as far as I know.
- lproven 3y ago
  Absolutely, and an excellent idea it is, too. Whereas I have worked for 2 of the largest 3 Linux vendors, and at both of them, the facilities and site-management people all run Windows. The excuse is "oh but we need to for the interoperability with our suppliers!" Note, this includes server side stuff and groupware. Meanwhile, the marketing and management people all use MacBooks. It's no wonder their desktop OSes are so poor. Only the techies use their own products, and the management don't listen to the geeks.
amelius 3y ago
I sometimes wonder what the IT world would look like if IBM locked down their IBM PC as hard as Apple currently does with their offerings.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  Presumably what you mean is "if IBM locked down their PC as hard as Apple currently does iOS," because MacOS isn't locked down at all.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    macOS is pretty hard locked to the hardware which is what OP is describing. And it’s easy to know how it would have turned out - as a footnote in the computing world as some other clonable system took over
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    macOS is quite locked down. It's not possible to easily distribute software to macOS users that isn't code-signed and notarized, both of which require a paid Apple Developer account and Apple's participation. This is also true for "side-loaded" apps, not just ones distributed via the app store. Yes, it's possible to run arcane shell commands to unset extended file system attributes to circumvent quarantine, but this is not "easily".
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      I know some Linux zealots think that if there's literally ANYTHING preventing a random binary downloaded from DefinitelyNotMalware.com from running, then it's "locked down," but that doesn't make it true. These same people seem to love to describe the Mac environment as a restrictive, nannyware-controlled hellscape, but this, too, is untrue. The Mac is open, but ships with sensible defaults because MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO BUSINESS RUNNING APPS THAT AREN'T VERIFIED. Macs ship with an option set in the Privacy & Security pane that limits apps to those from the App store -- but it's a radio button, and the other option is easy to choose ("App store and identified developers"). Yes, this still requires the code be signed, which is a 100% reasonable position in today's world. And yet: that's not even the end of it. If you do download something from an unsigned source -- either because it's built from source, or because it's from someone who is ideologically opposed to joining the dev program at Apple, or whatever -- all you have to do is right-click the icon and choose to open it. That will save it as an exception, and allow it to be run normally after that point. See: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from-an-unidentified-developer-mh40616/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from... At no point do you need to resort to "arcane shell commands" or "extended file system attributes." In fact, literally ALL of this is absolutely easy.
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
“If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared.” I don’t think so - Microsoft would have preferred having 100% control instead of sharing OS/2 with IBM. Windows 3.0 was the technical foundation that allowed things to go the way they went, and its technical capabilities were known, even if it needed time to prove itself in the market. Microsoft would likely have pushed Windows a lot harder than OS/2 even if they had both been concurrently available. OS/2 was my primary OS for a few years and it was truly awesome - we did things like running a 3-node BBS out of a single 486 with 12 MB RAM and one could format a floppy disk while the system remained responsive (try that with Windows). Fun times.
- chasil 3y ago
  The only way this would have happened is if Dave Cutler had never left DEC. Microsoft had already been the biggest commercial UNIX vendor with Xenix, and obtaining the architect of the VMS kernel gave them a brain trust that IBM could not match. I don't think that Dave Cutler would have been happy as one of several contributors to OS/2 as it slowly grew out of the 286. I think it was dead the moment he walked in the door.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Exactly this, and we should not valorize OS/2 as an operating system foundation. The kernel in NT is far superior. The "alternate timeline" I'd be more interested in is one where NT had propagated as a more open solution with either open source or more reasonable licensing costs, with a better more VMS and/or Unix-like CLI driven user space and multiple vendors offering systems somehow.
    - chasil 3y ago
      On the one hand, I have no idea why NT chose CMD.EXE as their command shell instead of pdksh; most would ascribe this to the influence of OS/2. NT was built with a POSIX interface, and Korn would have been a much better fit; one objection might be that NT forks processes very slowly, which is a major aspect of Korn. On the other hand, I don't believe Dave Cutler would have ever allowed /usr/src to ship with the source code to the kernel.
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ChrisArchitect 3y ago
More discussion on the os2museum link last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600108
rwmj 3y ago
Doesn't this rather imply that IBM would have priced OS/2 reasonably and been able to get OEMs to bundle it? There's no way Microsoft would have tolerated OEMs bundling an IBM-only OS/2, they would have pulled all the same illegal tricks they did with DRDOS. And on the first one, have you seen IBM's pricing ...
- fch42 3y ago
  IBM had, if somewhat limited, success in OEM-bundling OS/2 in Germany. That was not the least Microsoft's own fault (the non-US prices for Windows were ... "high"), and pretty much ended once Win95 got there. I had a student's license for OS/2 2.x from the 2nd IBM beta to 2.1; with the developer tools and networking, I remember it cost me half of what Win 3.1 plus tools would've set me back. By the time Win95 and OS/2 3.x (Warp) came out though ... Linux had already won for me.
- skissane 3y ago
  > Doesn't this rather imply that IBM would have priced OS/2 reasonably When I was around 11 or 12, I had a retail copy of OS/2 2.0 which my dad had bought me at some computer fair. Don't remember exactly how much it cost, but my recollection is it wasn't expensive–he would not have bought it for me if it was. I was amused by the fact that the box had a "Made in Australia" logo on it–the box and physical floppy disks were made here, but I doubt much of the software on them was.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  My understanding of the weird OS/2 marriage was that one early plan (that never happened) was that IBM OS/2 and MS OS/2 would be different SKUs. Microsoft's would be "the cheap SKU" and probably the one most bundled by OEMs because of existing Microsoft relationships with OEMs. (Keep in mind there was a mutual antagonism between IBM and the other OEMs and it would have be weirdly unlikely for IBM to sell OEMs on bundling their OS directly; part of the "marriage of convenience" was directly Microsoft's sway and relationships with the OEMs.) Some IBM accountant would declare some features as too expensive or too "real business" for the MS SKU and Microsoft would have to cut them. In theory Microsoft could have said some Windows things couldn't be in the IBM SKU because IBM OS/2 would be for "real business" and Windows was a "silly toy" for "consumers" (until it wasn't, when 3.1 started to win big). (Though that never seemed to happen either, Microsoft wound up letting IBM OS/2 Warp include the Windows compatibility layers.) It was expected that despite the shared OS/2 brand name (IBM's dumb insistence) the Microsoft and IBM OS/2's might have wound up feeling surprisingly different. Microsoft never actually sold an OS/2 SKU so there's all kinds of speculation of what that would have been like and how it would have differed from the IBM OS/2 SKUs we did get. The hard-to-find preview versions like the article talks about are our only glimpses into whatever crazy world that might have been had the weird OS/2 marriage "succeeded". (It's also a weird glimpse, as the article points out, into the insight that Microsoft probably was ahead of IBM on their versions of OS/2 and likely were intentionally sandbagging how much wound up getting sent over to IBM's side of the fence and their SKUs.) It's definitely a strange fork in the world of computing history, if the "divorce" hadn't happened, if Windows 3.1 hadn't won over everybody, if Microsoft hadn't attracted Dave Cutler to start on the NT Kernel, and so forth: the operating systems we use would have been hugely different (and probably not for the better, given IBM's IBM-ness, the design-by-committee parts of OS/2, and some of the still underappreciated technical marvels of the NT Kernel that we did get in this timeline).
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57 points by lproven 3y ago

With or without OS/2, it would be really interesting to see how everything turned out. Windows had such a profound impact on both business and personal computing that we might've been in a completely different place!

dflock 3y ago

Liam Proven does some stellar work for the Reg: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven

lproven 3y ago
Oh, thank you very much indeed! :-)

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work. Back in the day dogfooding was the Microsoft way. Well, at least as far as I know.

lproven 3y ago
Absolutely, and an excellent idea it is, too. Whereas I have worked for 2 of the largest 3 Linux vendors, and at both of them, the facilities and site-management people all run Windows. The excuse is "oh but we need to for the interoperability with our suppliers!" Note, this includes server side stuff and groupware. Meanwhile, the marketing and management people all use MacBooks. It's no wonder their desktop OSes are so poor. Only the techies use their own products, and the management don't listen to the geeks.

amelius 3y ago

I sometimes wonder what the IT world would look like if IBM locked down their IBM PC as hard as Apple currently does with their offerings.

ubermonkey 3y ago
Presumably what you mean is "if IBM locked down their PC as hard as Apple currently does iOS," because MacOS isn't locked down at all.
- bombcar 3y ago
  macOS is pretty hard locked to the hardware which is what OP is describing. And it’s easy to know how it would have turned out - as a footnote in the computing world as some other clonable system took over
- sho_hn 3y ago
  macOS is quite locked down. It's not possible to easily distribute software to macOS users that isn't code-signed and notarized, both of which require a paid Apple Developer account and Apple's participation. This is also true for "side-loaded" apps, not just ones distributed via the app store. Yes, it's possible to run arcane shell commands to unset extended file system attributes to circumvent quarantine, but this is not "easily".
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    I know some Linux zealots think that if there's literally ANYTHING preventing a random binary downloaded from DefinitelyNotMalware.com from running, then it's "locked down," but that doesn't make it true. These same people seem to love to describe the Mac environment as a restrictive, nannyware-controlled hellscape, but this, too, is untrue. The Mac is open, but ships with sensible defaults because MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO BUSINESS RUNNING APPS THAT AREN'T VERIFIED. Macs ship with an option set in the Privacy & Security pane that limits apps to those from the App store -- but it's a radio button, and the other option is easy to choose ("App store and identified developers"). Yes, this still requires the code be signed, which is a 100% reasonable position in today's world. And yet: that's not even the end of it. If you do download something from an unsigned source -- either because it's built from source, or because it's from someone who is ideologically opposed to joining the dev program at Apple, or whatever -- all you have to do is right-click the icon and choose to open it. That will save it as an exception, and allow it to be run normally after that point. See: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from-an-unidentified-developer-mh40616/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from... At no point do you need to resort to "arcane shell commands" or "extended file system attributes." In fact, literally ALL of this is absolutely easy.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago

“If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared.” I don’t think so - Microsoft would have preferred having 100% control instead of sharing OS/2 with IBM. Windows 3.0 was the technical foundation that allowed things to go the way they went, and its technical capabilities were known, even if it needed time to prove itself in the market. Microsoft would likely have pushed Windows a lot harder than OS/2 even if they had both been concurrently available. OS/2 was my primary OS for a few years and it was truly awesome - we did things like running a 3-node BBS out of a single 486 with 12 MB RAM and one could format a floppy disk while the system remained responsive (try that with Windows). Fun times.

chasil 3y ago
The only way this would have happened is if Dave Cutler had never left DEC. Microsoft had already been the biggest commercial UNIX vendor with Xenix, and obtaining the architect of the VMS kernel gave them a brain trust that IBM could not match. I don't think that Dave Cutler would have been happy as one of several contributors to OS/2 as it slowly grew out of the 286. I think it was dead the moment he walked in the door.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Exactly this, and we should not valorize OS/2 as an operating system foundation. The kernel in NT is far superior. The "alternate timeline" I'd be more interested in is one where NT had propagated as a more open solution with either open source or more reasonable licensing costs, with a better more VMS and/or Unix-like CLI driven user space and multiple vendors offering systems somehow.
  - chasil 3y ago
    On the one hand, I have no idea why NT chose CMD.EXE as their command shell instead of pdksh; most would ascribe this to the influence of OS/2. NT was built with a POSIX interface, and Korn would have been a much better fit; one objection might be that NT forks processes very slowly, which is a major aspect of Korn. On the other hand, I don't believe Dave Cutler would have ever allowed /usr/src to ship with the source code to the kernel.

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ChrisArchitect 3y ago

More discussion on the os2museum link last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600108

rwmj 3y ago

Doesn't this rather imply that IBM would have priced OS/2 reasonably and been able to get OEMs to bundle it? There's no way Microsoft would have tolerated OEMs bundling an IBM-only OS/2, they would have pulled all the same illegal tricks they did with DRDOS. And on the first one, have you seen IBM's pricing ...

fch42 3y ago
IBM had, if somewhat limited, success in OEM-bundling OS/2 in Germany. That was not the least Microsoft's own fault (the non-US prices for Windows were ... "high"), and pretty much ended once Win95 got there. I had a student's license for OS/2 2.x from the 2nd IBM beta to 2.1; with the developer tools and networking, I remember it cost me half of what Win 3.1 plus tools would've set me back. By the time Win95 and OS/2 3.x (Warp) came out though ... Linux had already won for me.
skissane 3y ago
> Doesn't this rather imply that IBM would have priced OS/2 reasonably When I was around 11 or 12, I had a retail copy of OS/2 2.0 which my dad had bought me at some computer fair. Don't remember exactly how much it cost, but my recollection is it wasn't expensive–he would not have bought it for me if it was. I was amused by the fact that the box had a "Made in Australia" logo on it–the box and physical floppy disks were made here, but I doubt much of the software on them was.
WorldMaker 3y ago
My understanding of the weird OS/2 marriage was that one early plan (that never happened) was that IBM OS/2 and MS OS/2 would be different SKUs. Microsoft's would be "the cheap SKU" and probably the one most bundled by OEMs because of existing Microsoft relationships with OEMs. (Keep in mind there was a mutual antagonism between IBM and the other OEMs and it would have be weirdly unlikely for IBM to sell OEMs on bundling their OS directly; part of the "marriage of convenience" was directly Microsoft's sway and relationships with the OEMs.) Some IBM accountant would declare some features as too expensive or too "real business" for the MS SKU and Microsoft would have to cut them. In theory Microsoft could have said some Windows things couldn't be in the IBM SKU because IBM OS/2 would be for "real business" and Windows was a "silly toy" for "consumers" (until it wasn't, when 3.1 started to win big). (Though that never seemed to happen either, Microsoft wound up letting IBM OS/2 Warp include the Windows compatibility layers.) It was expected that despite the shared OS/2 brand name (IBM's dumb insistence) the Microsoft and IBM OS/2's might have wound up feeling surprisingly different. Microsoft never actually sold an OS/2 SKU so there's all kinds of speculation of what that would have been like and how it would have differed from the IBM OS/2 SKUs we did get. The hard-to-find preview versions like the article talks about are our only glimpses into whatever crazy world that might have been had the weird OS/2 marriage "succeeded". (It's also a weird glimpse, as the article points out, into the insight that Microsoft probably was ahead of IBM on their versions of OS/2 and likely were intentionally sandbagging how much wound up getting sent over to IBM's side of the fence and their SKUs.) It's definitely a strange fork in the world of computing history, if the "divorce" hadn't happened, if Windows 3.1 hadn't won over everybody, if Microsoft hadn't attracted Dave Cutler to start on the NT Kernel, and so forth: the operating systems we use would have been hugely different (and probably not for the better, given IBM's IBM-ness, the design-by-committee parts of OS/2, and some of the still underappreciated technical marvels of the NT Kernel that we did get in this timeline).

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